TY - JOUR
TI - A statistical campaign
AU - Iris Veysey
PY - 2016
VL - 5
IS - Spring 2016
KW - Crimea
KW - Crimean War
KW - Disease
KW - England and her Soldiers
KW - Florence Nightingale
KW - Florence Nightingale Museum
KW - Harriet Martineau
KW - Healthcare
KW - Literature
KW - Martineau
KW - Mathematics
KW - Mathematics Gallery
KW - Medicine
KW - Military
KW - Nightingale
KW - Nineteenth Century
KW - Nursing
KW - Sanitation
KW - Science Museum
KW - Statistics
KW - Victorian
AB - This essay is an account of the making of England and her Soldiers (1859) by Harriet Martineau and Florence Nightingale. The book is a literary account of the Crimean War, written by Martineau and based on Nightingale’s statistical studies of mortality during the conflict. Nightingale was passionate about statistics and healthcare. Whilst working as a nurse in the Crimea, she witnessed thousands of soldiers die of infectious diseases that might have been prevented with proper sanitation. After the war, she launched a campaign to convince the British government to make permanent reforms to military healthcare, compiling a dataset on mortality in the Crimea. She worked with the government’s Royal Commission investigating healthcare during the war, but also worked privately with Martineau to publicise her findings. Martineau and Nightingale grasped that the lay reader was more receptive to statistical information in a literary format than in dense statistical reports. As such, Nightingale’s data was interwoven with Martineau’s text. The pair illustrated their book with Nightingale’s ‘Rose Diagram’, a statistical graphic which simply illustrated the rate of mortality.
N1 - The new permanent Mathematics Gallery at the Science Museum is designed by Zaha Hadid Architects and will open in winter 2016. The gallery will tell stories spanning 400 years of mathematical practice. It is funded by David and Claudia Harding.
N1 - Nightingale attaches detailed appendices of her data and sources in her Notes on Matters Affecting the Health of the British Army (1858).
PB - The Science Museum Group
SN - 2054-5770
LA - eng
DO - 10.15180/160504
UR - http://journal.sciencemuseum.org.uk/browse/issue-05/a-statistical-campaign/
T2 - Science Museum Group Journal